Video: How to sell digital marketing into your company

Marketing Week returns to Adelaide from 25-29 August, and in preparation for the event, the team have uploaded a batch of interviews from last year’s gig – which includes a 4-min piece from The Nest Director Stuart Buchanan on how to sell digital marketing into your company. If you’re looking to find ways to gain more traction for your digital marketing efforts, or are campaigning for more budget, this might help you out.

Video: The Future of Digital Publishing

When speaking at last year’s Ubud Writers Festival in Bali, The Nest Director, Stuart Buchanan, was interviewed by Shalini Gidoomal from Smart Monkey TV, an African video channel that broadcasts from the crossroads between culture and technology.

In this newly-released clip, Stuart talks about the future of digital publishing from the perspective of an independent publisher, and how the changing nature of distribution platforms has already led to a fundamental change in the way in which many writers think about narrative. Naturally, the talk also revolves around The Nest’s digital publishing arm, Branches, and there’s reference to our award-winning app, Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll.

AIMIA Award for The Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll

Our app for the classic Australian play, ‘Summer of the Seventeenth Doll‘ has won ‘Best of Tablet – Learning & Education’ at the 2014 AIMIA Awards, Australia’s most prestigious digital industry recognition program.

The iPad app charts the 57-year history of the work, considered as the most historically significant play in Australian theatre history. Publisher of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll play text, Currency Press, commissioned The Nest to develop an app that would collate archival material from the first production on 28 November 1955 up until the most recent production in 2012, with material sourced from a range of archives and institutions along the east coast of Australia.

The multimedia-heavy application offers a curated experience around the full text of play, written by celebrated Australian playwright Ray Lawler, which allows users to explore the piece from a variety of perspectives. The app is intended to be an engaging, immersive and interactive education resource for all readers of the play, from high school students, teachers and educators, undergraduates, theatre practitioners, actors, academics and scholars, to theatre lovers of all ages.

Key features of the app include the complete play text, which is fully searchable and comes with the ability to add personal annotations, interviews with Lawler and accomplished theatre practitioners such as director, Neil Armstrong and actor, Susie Porter, a behind-the-scenes look at key productions, a pictorial timeline of the play’s long history and a read a range of viewpoints on the work’s significance.

The Nest Director Stuart Buchanan said “During our extensive preparatory research, we found no similar apps of this nature, so there were very few touch stones or reference points to play off. The interface design, information architecture and user flow was developed from scratch, exclusively for this app. We relish the creative and technical opportunities that come with true innovation, so we were especially thrilled when the work won at the AIMIA Awards“.

Toby Leon, digital project manager at Currency Press, sees a big future for digital publishing for the education market. Says Leon: “Our Summer of the Seventeenth Doll app is the first of its kind and one which we see as paving the way for the development of future apps for the education market. There is a significant disparity between the quality of apps used by the target during their leisure time versus those used in school or university. This app offers a ‘taste of things to come’ for lovers of texts such as this Australian classic“.

The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll iPad app is now available on the App Store, priced $19.99.

The Nest’s Amplify smartphone app selected as an Official Honoree in The 2014 Webby Awards

Our smartphone app for the 2013 AMP Amplify Festival has been selected as an Official Honoree in The 18th Annual Webby Awards.

Designed as an interaction and navigation platform for AMP’s biannual “Business Innovation & Thought Leadership” event, the app included deep data on sessions and speakers, gamification elements, social media tracking and augmented reality tools.

The Webby Awards is described as “the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet” and its Academy includes the likes of Kevin Spacey, David Bowie, Arianna Huffington, Biz Stone and Lawrence Lessig. This year they received over 12,000 entries from over 60 countries – Official Honoree status is awarded to the top 20 percent of all work entered that exhibits “remarkable achievement”.

Upcoming Talk: AGDA – Out On Your Own

The Nest CEO Stuart Buchanan and Executive Producer Rebecca Hedderly will be talking next week at an event for AGDA – Australian Graphic Design Association – the peak national organization representing the Australian graphic design industry.

For an evening session titled “Out On Your Own“, the evening features a series of speakers offering insights into the opportunities and pitfalls of starting your own creative agency. Here’s the description from AGDA:

OUT ON YOUR OWN

If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can’t, you’re right.

Making the switch from Employee to Employer, or from national to international, you need to be Business Savvy, Street smart and have ounces of bravery.

They say fortune favours the brave, so hear about those who have made the leap of faith, hear their stories, pitfalls and tips about making it, faking it, and raking it in.

This is definitely not a “how to start a design business” seminar but casual chat with the founders of design businesses from new start-ups to international achievers. Hear their design business stories, how the decisions, collaborations, initiatives and awards they won made a difference to their businesses.

This promises to be an evening of warts-n-all, inspirational design discussion.

Upcoming Talk: The Cult Of The Now

Every moment of every day is now pregnant with the possibility of new information – devices are persistently within reach 24 hours a day, chirping for our attention. When the call comes, we instinctively respond – so much so that the average person now consumes up to 75 gigabytes of media every day and switches applications 36 times every hour. The net affect of rabid information consumption and multitasking is not only distracting, it is also now proven to be literally rewiring our brains.

But what value does immediate information bring? What is so important that it has the power to interrupt our workflow, our personal conversations, our intimate moments? We’re constantly being told that our attention is valuable – so why are we throwing it away?

As individuals, we have the power to say ‘no’ – if only we would.

As digital designers, writers, developers and producers, we have the power to change the paradigm – if only we would.

In an upcoming talk as part of the deFrost* series, Stuart Buchanan, Director of The Nest and Head of Digital for The Frost* Group, campaigns for the dissolution of The Cult of The Now, for a connected experience that celebrates relevancy not immediacy, and looks at practical ways in which we can bring focus to our digital lives.